Full Album Links: Michigan Football vs Penn State 2022 (Patrick Barron) | Flickr Michigan Football vs Penn State 2022 (Bryan Fuller) | Flickr Once upon a time in Michigan Stadium, the announcement for a maize out would be somewhere on your ticket stub (see Wisconsin and Michigan State). There wasn't much fanfare surrounding these announcements or neat social media graphics, just a general reminder that "on Wednesdays we wear pink, also wear maize to this one. But just this one." The stadium was maize, but apart from the student section it was a maize-ish. It's like driving around the mid-west a week after the leaves hit their peak fall colors. Up close there are still some spectacularly vibrant yellows but zoom out far enough and the entire forest becomes a weird brown that you convince yourself is still vibrant if you squint and stare at it. This was especially true for maize-outs in October. At some point, you wake up before sunrise to go tailgating, your outdoor
Full Album Links: Michigan Football at Indiana 2022 (Patrick Barron) Michigan Football at Indiana 2022 (Bryan Fuller) After the first Indiana touchdown I headed towards one of the endzone corners that Michigan would be attacking on the next drive. An event staff yelled at me to move because I was in the way of the emergency medical cart. I moved but was confused - I didn't see an injury on the touchdown play, or at least I didn't see the typical timeout that occurs when someone is down long enough to need the cart. I turned around and my heart sank when I saw the entire Michigan team taking a knee. [Patrick Barron]One of the worst sights in sports is seeing a cart come out. It takes the air out of everything. At the very least Mike Hart appeared alert as I watched the cart go to the ambulance in the tunnel. I was shook for the rest of the first half - especially considering this was Mike freakin' Hart. I started attending Michigan football games in the early 2000s. Mike
Full Album Link I'll sometimes go into a game with a certain thing in mind that I want to photograph – this week it was one of those “I CHEER FOR THE PUNTER” shirts. I figured I would find one eventually and it would be a silly photo. What I was not expecting was the entire dang stadium to be very on-brand. [Patrick Barron]A couple years ago I made a whole photo album dedicated to Lovie Smith's beard and this year's Iowa game I could dedicate an entire album to on-brand Iowa shirts and signs. [Patrick Barron]I appreciate the hell out of Iowa fans. They know their identity as a sports team (which has been the same for ~30 years) and they fully embrace it. For a time during this game I felt bad for them, that was until they started a “Fire Brian” chant and started hurdling stuff onto the field. Nothing hit me but at one point I looked down to my left and saw a can of Busch Light. Maybe this was dangerous, maybe this was simply a Kinnick Stadium baptism. It felt l
Typically when photographing a sports team you want to position yourself such that the faces of the team you're covering are facing towards you (which would mean we are in the endzone that Michigan is trying to score in). This can change, of course, depending on the course of the game. If Michigan is playing Rutgers and the Scarlet Knights have gone through three quarters without a first down then you don't have to move around much. If the other team has a world ending offense it makes more sense to go to the endzone they're scoring in for better photos because if the story of game becomes "Ohio State is going to score 60 points" then, well. that's the story we have to tell (sorry). This game was. confusing at times in this regard. The last three weeks were pretty straight forward because the ball only really went one direction so the photographers were able to camp in the endzone more than a Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer server. Maryland's offense w
On the heels of several days of getting my soul restored after watching Hawaii's defense, I am back with this week's FFFF. No, it's not a good team this week. In fact, it's likely another very bad one, but I can guarantee you this piece will be less grim than either of the Hawaii ones from last week. Today we're looking at the offense for the University of Connecticut, who return to the schedule for the first time since 2013, when the main photo for this piece was taken by a then-much-younger Patrick Barron of The Michigan Daily in his pre-MGoBlog days. The Huskies are 1-2 on the season and in the first year of head coach Jim Mora Jr. Can he fix UConn football? Too early tell, but we can learn a few things in doing this exercise. The Film: We're using film from UConn's week zero matchup with Utah State for this one. I had hoped to use last week's game against Syracuse due to the Orange being a Power 5 opponent but I could not find a usable cop